


Routine

by gondalsqueen



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Love, Post-Star Wars: A New Dawn, Romance, Slice of Life, nice things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 09:31:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11825913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gondalsqueen/pseuds/gondalsqueen
Summary: Five memories from Kanan and Hera’s early years. And one kiss.





	Routine

**Author's Note:**

> Double plus thanks to [ Amilyn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Amilyn/pseuds/Amilyn), who is a fantastic and diligent beta.

  
**Five memories from Kanan and Hera’s early years. And one kiss:**

...

    **1.Training**

When they’re stuck on the ship with nothing better to do, Kanan trains for a few hours each day. Not all of it is rigorous—overtraining is a good way to break a healthy body. Hera joins him for one, maybe two of those hours.

They spar, and he kicks her butt. To be fair, their matches aren’t representative of a real fight. Her workout gear fits snugly enough that he can see the muscles bunch before she moves, and he’s onto her—most people wouldn’t expect a Twi’lek girl to hit first.

So when he calls “Go!” and she drops her knee and drives her fist at his throat before he’s finished the word, he’s ready. A step to the side and she goes flying past him. He catches her arm as she passes. Two more seconds and he could dislocate her elbow, were this real.

But sparring with a Force-user has made her fast. She rocks on her heel and reverses direction, going with his tug. Then she twists and slams her other elbow toward his face, and he has to drop her arm to block it. Success, but it puts him off balance.

Most opponents would step back and regroup at this point. Up against a bigger adversary, Hera knows that she’ll lose her advantage if he has time to think. She steps past him and aims a kick at the back of his knee. He jumps straight up—but nobody else would be able to jump like that. His feet hit the ground and he grabs for a lek, but she hops to the side this time instead of turning, and it’s out of his reach. Good girl.

She’s quick as a greased nexu, but not as quick as a Jedi. Kanan punches, catches the arms intended to block him, jabs his leg out, and sweeps hers right out from under her. Hera’s flat on her back. She made it three minutes though, and he wasn’t taking it particularly easy on her.

“You’re fast,” he tells her, helping her up.

She rubs her rear, more irritated than hurt. “You’re faster.”

“Than anyone you’ll face, yeah.”

“Mm hmm.” She drops into a crouch, ready to begin again, her mouth a grim, determined thing. Self-discipline, military drills—he knows how to conduct these things, and she knows how to learn from them. She’s usually a good sport about it too. Hera is in charge of operations and the ship and information and keeping a level head. She’s in charge of…most aspects of their relationship, really. But when it comes to on-the-ground combat… Even in the beginning, she’d told him, “Don’t coddle me. _Teach_ me.”

Something’s changed lately, though. Nothing big. But for the past month or so she hasn’t exactly enjoyed sparring the way she used to.

Kanan has his suspicions. When he met Hera, she’d been eighteen, strong, brilliant, well-trained…and despite all that, overconfident. Now she’s twenty and a little more realistic, and they’re both savvy enough with their plans that she hasn’t been in a real fistfight lately. She doesn’t doubt herself—that’s not Hera’s style—but she’s reassessed her abilities, and the only measure she has lately is sparring _him_. He thinks she’s rating herself a little low.

So he lies. “I need a break. Let’s do weights instead.”

“Kanan, if you’re tired—”

“Oh, don’t worry. _You’re_ going to lift the weights.”

The quirk of a smile. “Thanks a lot.”

“Just for you, ma’am.” He picks up the nearby towel and whaps it at her back, teasing. She sticks out her tongue at him over her shoulder. Just like that, he’s stupidly happy.

He’s where he wants to be, more or less. They aren’t sharing a bed, but he’s closer to her than he’s ever been to anyone. And if their relationship is not quite sexual or even romantic, it is physical. He touches Hera in these casual ways and she relaxes, without pretense. So if he doesn’t quite have everything, at any rate, he has enough.

They’re two days out from Rishi, which is plenty of recovery time for tired muscles. So he kicks her butt at the weights, too.

Kanan counts while she squats, the bar on her shoulders. “Seven. Eight. Nine.” He’s dialed the magnets up heavy today. “Ten.” She’s wearing that frown of concentration. Her legs tremble. “Eleeeeeeven—” he drawls out, wondering if she’s going to make it. Her resolve hasn’t given, but at some point her muscles will.

“Unf!” Hera’s legs crumple and the safety mechanism snaps the weight up and off her shoulders with a clang. “Okay.” She grabs the towel and wipes the sweat from her face. “Whew.”

“You’ve got four left,” Kanan tells her.

She gives him that straight-lekku, skeptical-eyebrow look.

“Rest and then finish it.”

So she takes three deep, slow breaths and puts the towel down. “Okay. Let’s get it over with.”

“Twelve.” That one’s strong. “These are your most important muscles,” Kanan says sagaciously. “Thirteen.”  

“I thought it was my core,” she grinds out, not really caring.

“You need that to operate. But thighs are your strongest—” He blinks, wondering if his eyes are playing tricks on him. “Did you just—” _Balance that weight on one leg while you scratched your calf?_ He doesn’t have to finish the question. Her sheepish, innocent look is answer enough.

She shrugs. “It itched.”

“Okay, I thought you were done, but now you get ten more.”

“Drill sergeant,” she accuses.

...

    **2\. Working**

These are Kanan’s most typical early memories of Hera: back hunched over a display, lek tapping absently as she mutters numbers to herself and makes notes on the data.

He joins her this time, because she’s been at it for over two hours with no break. “What’s the verdict?”

“I don’t know,” she frowns. “Most of this stuff is innocuous. Public domain. The troop movements might be _here_ , hidden behind other things, but even Chopper can’t crunch all of this. I need a machine, a really good mainframe or a straight numbers droid, to sort all of this out and correlate probabilities at the same time.”

“Wait—” He glances at her notes. “Are you trying to figure this by hand?”

“Instinct, really. Just looking for the needle in the haystack. It wouldn’t hurt if I had a degree in advanced data analysis either. Ugh.” She runs her hands up over her cap, lekku straightening, then mutters something that sounds suspiciously like a curse.

“Wait—” he asks. “Does that mean—?”

“What?”

“When you straighten your lekku like that…”

She shifts in her seat, carefully neutral. “What?”

“Is that a curse?” Has she been cursing him out all these months over his taskmaster weight routines, when she’d seemed so calm?

Now she looks embarrassed. “‘Curse,’ is too strong a word.”

“What would you call it then?”

“Expression of frustration,” she tells him loftily.

He wishes he had a recording of every meeting with every infuriating client, all the times Hera handled sleemo contacts with aplomb. He wants to look at what her lekku were doing.

She’s back to tapping at the datapad, though.

He does have _one_ recording—from last week, when they’d thought the client might mis-report the details of their contract. He calls it up on the copilot’s display and watches it through. There go the straight lekku, sure enough. And _that_ one—he knows what that gesture means. Kanan cracks up laughing.

Hera pretends to ignore him. “It’s not that funny,” she says finally.

“Come on, Hera. It’s hilarious. You are the coolest customer I’ve ever met. And all this time—how long have you been cursing at people in Ryl?”

“Since birth, if you listen to my father.” She shifts in the seat, stretching her shoulders one way and then another.

“You going to keep working?”

“I’ve got a few more strings to tease out before I lose my train of thought.”

She doesn’t want her attention split, so he goes to work on the connections between the nav computer and the starboard control panel. “I like you even if you do swear like a pilot.”

“Hey, it’s really not _that_ bad!” She smiles at him over her protests, and her eyes crinkle in affection for a moment before she turns back to the work.

...

      **3\. Down Time**

They have surprisingly a lot of this, since they’re in transit so much of the time. Hera discovers that it’s better with company. So she reads up on what work she can until finally the words and numbers begin to swim in front of her eyes. Then she drags herself into the common area, stretching stiff muscles, and announces, “My brain is fried.” Kanan makes dinner while she washes dishes, and they flop on the dejarik bench to watch a holo.

Kanan’s improbable romantic comedies. Hera’s historical dramatizations. But the best—the very best—are the 50-year-old Mandalorian gunslinger flicks.

Hera picks the movie this time. They sprawl out with popmoss and space carrots. Kanan shoots her that smirk that means this is a Hera Syndulla concoction of a meal, but if the foods don’t “go” together (and she’s still not convinced that’s a real thing), they cover a reasonable gamut of nutrients, at least.

This is a good show. They watch as the leader of a small band of rogue warriors confronts a lone wolf determined not to join them. Then the soldier removes his helmet to reveal—Hera is in ecstasy—a woman. “You can’t even tell!” she exclaims. “We’ve watched a half hour of this holo, and they let her fight exactly like the men.”

“Mm hmm,” Kanan nods, amused.

“This was made _fifty years_ ago.”

Then they fall in love. As happens in movies.

“Kanan.” Hera nudges him.

“Hera.”

“I got you a romance.”

He smiles across at her. “Thanks for accidentally picking a romance.”

The curved bench is not exactly comfortable for anything but sitting up straight, and they get lazier as the holo goes on. Eventually Hera leans against Kanan and settles his arm over her shoulder, and he activates the armrest so he has something to lean back against. And then his arm is draped casually across her breast, hand resting on her hip, and a pleasant feeling settles into her abdomen. Kanan watches the movie with studied nonchalance, but she knows he’s not really paying attention anymore.

It’s not exactly unusual for Kanan to touch her like this. When he’s feeling down, when he shows her how to do some flip, when he works out the kinks in her back after a long flight, hands go where they need to be. Most of the time it doesn’t mean anything.

That’s not true. It says everything in the galaxy about love and trust, it just doesn’t mean anything explicitly sexual. Not quite. Not yet. That step is up to her.

These trips through hyperspace and these casual(ish) touches are a safe space for Hera. They’ll emerge from the void and go back to fighting, and she and Kanan will move forward or backward—away from this limbo, at any rate. Right now she’s feeling her way along, trying to lead them into something more serious without exactly knowing the way. And Kanan, who has loved her painfully for over a year, trusts her enough to follow her.

She needs to find a way to put this thing between them into words, and soon. She needs to get solid ground under his feet.

...

    **4\. Running Ops**

They get the data, they’re fleeing from the cavalry on a stolen speeder, when the stormtroopers open fire. Hera swerves, but she doesn’t have Kanan’s preternatural ability to miss every shot, and they need a better plan. She heads for the red light district.

They abandon the speeder in a vortex of illegal parking and head for the most chaotic building that doesn’t have a queue. Booming bass and lurid pink light spill onto the sidewalk—both know before they get inside that it’s a strip club, and Kanan grips Hera’s hand tightly.

Most people in here are blissed out on some drug of choice though, and it’s an easy thing to slip through the crowd. They’ve almost reached the staff entrance at the back when troops come through the front door and fan out.

Nobody screams. Stormtroopers aren’t unusual in here.

“Keep going,” Hera murmurs to Kanan, though it doesn’t need saying.

But when they get to the back entrance, they’re not the only ones trying to shoulder through. A patron with the build of a shockball defenseman and the stance of a drunken deep space pilot is in some kind of argument with one of the dancing girls. No…not an argument. She’s telling him that the area is off-limits, and he honestly seems too far gone to know that she’s speaking. Which might work out okay—he’s about to fall over one way or the other—except that he has his knee in the door.

Kanan looks back at Hera, and she shrugs her assent. Chivalry here certainly isn’t going to harm the mission. So he lifts the man up bodily and deposits him a good three feet behind them. “Sorry buddy. Staff only.” Hera slips her hand from Kanan’s and lets her fingers hover over her blaster, ready for trouble, but the crowd swallows the man, who probably isn’t quite sure what just happened.  

Then he turns back to the dancer, standing in the half-open door. She sizes him up, then glances at Hera behind him and sighs an aggravated sigh. “All right. Come on.”  

Hera nods her thanks as they slip past and gets a twist of a sympathetic smile in return.

“Janitor’s entrance is over there.” The dancer jabs her thumb over her shoulder. “The whole sector connects through the service entrances, so you can get wherever you want. I’ll cover for you with the bucketheads.”

“You won’t get in trouble?” Kanan asks.

Hera and the dancer laugh identical laughs, and then the woman pats Kanan on the cheek. “I’m window dressing, sweetie. The décor can’t cause trouble.  Get going and we’ll call it even.”

And then they’re off, running full speed through tunnels and past dumpsters.

They’ve gotten six blocks closer to the Ghost when the Empire catches up to them. Well, that’s a little dramatic. It’s only a few Stormtroopers so far.

The first one gets a lucky shot before they’re in a decent defensive position. Hera hears the whine of the blaster discharging, then Kanan’s low grunt and the smell of searing cloth. A half-second later he fires over her head and the soldier falls.

She’s dropped to one knee, reaching for her blaster. At eye level, she catches a glimpse of Kanan’s burned shirt and burned flesh before he pulls away.

“Not much of a hit. It’s fine,” he assures her.

The next two make easy targets, but before they’ve fallen five more come around the corner. The data tapes they’re chasing must be really good.  

Kanan whips their blasters away with his signature move and takes on three of them. That leaves two for Hera. Two Stormtroopers. Two. The fight is easier than she expected. Front kick, back kick, pistol whip, fist to the throat—that one hurts a little—and she’s taken down two Stormtroopers in full armor, just like that.

Kanan is watching her with that sexy, sassy smile, but he only means congratulations.  She dusts her hands dramatically for his benefit.

“Told you you were good,” he says.

“Ah, there we go. There had to be some way this reflected well on you.”

“Yep. You’ve had excellent training.” Those eyebrows hold just the slightest sense of brooding though.

“What?” Hera asks.

He shakes his head. Nothing. But she knows him too well, so he adds, “It’s dumb. You can handle these guys easily, and part of me still wishes you’d let me take the front line.”

Hera considers him for a moment. _Get out of the way_ might be a legitimate request sometimes. _Stand back and let me take all the danger_ is not. “No,” she tells him simply.

She didn’t expect argument just now, but she hasn’t expected the smile, either.

But then they hear the methodical clatter of boots down the hallway. The sound stops for a moment and the hatch between them and the next establishment whirs to life and begins to close. Great, some buckethead has found the controls. They should give that guy a promotion.

Hera can make it before the hatch closes. Kanan won’t.

Okay, go. Hesitating is never a solution. She’s about to jump through and think of… _something_ when she takes a look at the door and thinks of something. And before she can second guess it, she’s wedged herself against the door, holding it open. It’s light metal, some duraplast alloy, or she’d be crushed. Still—Kanan gives a low whistle.

Hera’s working to failure again though, losing ground an inch at a time, gritting her teeth. “Go, dummy.” He jumps through in an instant and pulls her out amidst the first blaster fire. The hatch snaps shut behind them.

“Come on,” he says, but he’s already blasted the controls on this side before she manages to clamber to her feet. And when she does, she’s met with shooting pain down one leg. She falls with a wounded yelp and hasn’t managed to get off the floor when Kanan turns back to her. “Hera—you’re hit?”

She shakes her head. “Just this stupid thigh muscle. I think it ripped.”

He picks her up, throwing her over his shoulder without ceremony. It’s not a particularly comfortable way to carry her to safety, but he needs a hand free to fire, should it become necessary. And this way she can cover his back. Good thing she already has her blaster out of her boot.

But hopefully it won’t come to that. He takes off fast, and she swallows a cry at the rough handling of injured muscles. “Guess I shouldn’t have complained about those extra sets,” she mutters.

Three transports later, they get back to the Ghost without an escort, and Hera deems it safer to stay put than take off and risk arousing suspicion. Time to do some damage control. “Off,” she tells Kanan, tugging at the burned shirt.

It’s fused to his side, of course. He gets out of one arm, then takes a deep breath and rips, leaving torn and burned fabric behind. Perched on the worktable with a full view of the injury Hera startles in sympathy. “Ouch,” she tells him, fingers hovering over the charred skin.

She’s not walking much, so Kanan gets the med kit. Local anesthetic. Tweezers. Nobody likes this part. She has to clean out all the bits of thread and dirt before putting on the bacta, or it will heal into his skin. Which usually isn’t a terrible problem—it will be very sanitary at that point, after all—but it’s also frowned upon as a general practice.

“Ready, love?” she asks. He won’t feel it, but tweezers digging in his burned side still seem like torture. He nods and closes his eyes.

She squeezes his shoulder fondly before finishing the job.

Muscle knitters hurt like fire, and they need to go into a relaxed muscle, so toughing it out isn’t really an option for Hera. What Kanan gives her works as an anesthetic and relaxant while he inserts the knitter, but it’s not fantastic on a Twi’lek’s system. They’re ready for it when she goes a bit dopey, and already in the fresher by the time she starts vomiting ten minutes later. Kanan holds the limp lekku back from her face until she’s emptied her system, which is really above and beyond on his part. She sneaks a look back and he’s _smiling_ at her. So she curls her lekku into a figure eight against his hand. “Thanks, love.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, ‘thanks, love.’”

“No, I mean the lekku.”

She blushes.

He puts her to bed.  She’s still a little giddy, but maybe that cuts through a lot of the unnecessary reasoning she does most of the time. All of this waiting for the right moment suddenly seems foolish, and it’s the most natural thing in the world to stretch up and kiss him on the cheek. On the cheek, but near enough the lips that her intention can’t be mistaken for innocent.

He freezes. All of the muscles in his face go perfectly still. “I think that’s the ganta talking,” he tells her gently.

“I wasn’t talking,” Hera points out.  

Kanan leans over and kisses her on the forehead. “You’d better get some sleep. I’ll watch the scanners for company.”

She wants to tell him that it’s _not_ the drugs, that she would have asked this same thing yesterday or two weeks ago if she hadn’t been an idiot. But protestations at this point won’t sound particularly sexy. (And, she realizes belatedly, her mouth probably tastes like vomit. Not the most enticing first kiss.) And also she is very, very sleepy.

“Your anesthetic is wearing off,” she murmurs instead. “Take something for the burn.”

He pats her lek with affection.

...

      **5\. Regrouping**

She doesn’t see him again until breakfast the next morning, which is a worryingly long time given the close quarters. Her head is clear and her leg stiff but healed. He follows the smell of caf—which was her plan.

“Good morning, dear,” she says, too chipper.

His eyes smile at her. “How’s the invalid?”

“Me? All better. How’s your side?”

“Still bacta patched.” He sees her narrow-eyed expression. “You can check it yourself.”

“Oh, I will.”

He nods his head just a little, which means he’s thinking of some plan of his own.

“You’re going to make me do rehab lifting, aren’t you?” Hera asks him.

“You know it.” He grabs a bowl of mixed grains and his mug and joins her. “I was a physical therapist on one of the Chandrilan colonies for eight months. One of my favorite jobs.”

“I didn’t know that.” Helping people heal, helping people get strong—she has a clear image of what Kanan might be, if they didn’t live in this place where he has no choice but to fight. “I’m in good hands, in other words.”

He nods. She already knows that, though.

“You know, Kanan,” Hera twirls her spoon. “My head’s pretty clear this morning.”

He goes still again, just like last night. “So…” he asks, trying for casual, “Do…we need to talk?” He’s terrified.

Whatever preamble she intended melts away under the need to make things better for him now. “No,” she says. Then she winds her hand in the front of his shirt and pulls him in and kisses him sweetly on the corner of his lips.

“What—” He swallows against the hoarseness in his voice. “Hera… Do you…?”

She puts her spoon down and looks him level in the eye. “I love you. You know that, right?”

“I do. I just wasn’t sure you loved me like…” He hesitates, then touches his finger to her lower lip very gently, “…like this.”

“It’s like this,” she confirms.  “That is, assuming you haven’t moved on?”

Kanan laughs out loud, relieved and awkward and…wrecked, from the sound of it. Wrecked, but keeping his act together. Hera leans in close to his ear and says, “I’m going to kiss you for real then.”

He nods, a tiny thing, and she leans in with her hands on his shoulders before she can lose her nerve.

Sweet. Easy. But not chaste. She kisses him until the frown melts, then tilts her head to get the full benefit of those lips, and Kanan kisses her back, long and light and full of possibility.  

“Hera,” he breathes, and he’s so far in that something clenches in her throat.  When she leans her forehead against his and takes a deep breath, it smells like him and her head spins.

“Hey—” He cups her chin and turns her face up to him, searching. Later they will need to have a long conversation _. I didn’t want to start something I couldn’t finish_ , she scripts inside her head. _So we had to wait._ _I wanted to give you something sure. Something safe. You deserve that from me._

Now isn’t the time for prolonged speeches, but she does need to answer the question he hasn’t asked. “I want to make sure you know where we stand,” she tells him. “As long as I’m anywhere, I want you there, too.”

He knows that—that’s what his face says—he knows that, but feared that if he pushed her to say it she would fall the wrong way.

But that’s the thing. She isn’t falling. “Hey—” she says back, and kisses his cheekbone chastely. “We’re all right. Just remember what you always tell me, love. I’m not going to drop you. Just jump.”

His arms go around her more certainly. Here they are, a rogue Jedi and a Twi’lek woman in a galaxy filled with background hostility on the best days, and both have had to fight hard to say “I want” without feeling selfish.  But Hera has plans, big plans, and for once the stars are aligning in her favor.

**Author's Note:**

> ...Okay, one-ISH kisses.


End file.
